Jailhouse Jihad

Recruitment of jihad warriors isn’t just something that goes on in far-off places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Paraguay: it has also been going on in the Texas prison system.

CBS-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth has “uncovered a disturbing half-hour videotape apparently used as a recruitment tool in the Beto One Prison Unit in East Texas.”

The confiscated video is titled ‘A Message to the Oppressed’ and carried a militant Islamic sermon in praise of terrorists to inmates before authorities seized it during Islamic services.

The tape features the anti-Semitic exhortations by the California-based Imam Muhammad Abdullah who claims that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were actually carried out by the Israeli and U.S. governments.

‘Are we to believe that some person that some people walked in airports and hijacked airplanes and then just went and blew up buildings blew up the Pentagon? This is ignorance to the max.’

The Imam’s tape ends by giving credit to Hamas, al-Jihad and Hizballah. All three groups are listed as terror organizations by the State Department….

Some terrorism experts say the videotape is new evidence of militant Islamic groups infiltrating prisons through religious programs. The Senate judiciary subcommittee on terrorism concluded recently that U.S. prisons and jails are a key area of recruitment for Al Qaeda and other terror organizations….

‘There have been cases domestically here in the United States and some of the training we have received indicates that there is a possibility that there is a recruiting effort going on inside prisons,’ said John Moriarty, Inspector General of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. ‘As a matter of fact, in other states, other than Texas, there has been confirmation of that.’…

Comments Mark Briskman of the Anti-Defamation League: “You have a potential in this prison system, as these people begin to get out, in terms of recruiting them into whether it’s al Queda or Hamas or Islamic Jihad, and possibly be recruited to fight overseas or possibly be recruited to perform terrorist acts in the United States.”

The article notes:

Some prison chaplains say the discovery of the tape raises [concern] that religious freedoms in jail appear to have been abused to help spread a militant message that encourages terrorism.

Indeed.

In a continuation of the article, we meet Omar Rakeeb, who has “carried an Islamic outreach from his mosque in Midland as a Muslim chaplain to federal and state prisons.”

He brought the videotape into the Beto One Unit, but he denies any knowledge of it: “‘I didn’t have anything to do with showing the tape,’ Rakeeb said. He said an inmate ordered the tape to the chaplain’s office. . . . Rakeeb was unable to explain who removed the tape from Rakeeb’s office and who else, besides him, had access to a VCR to show it to inmates. . . .

The 55-year-old Chaplain said when asked about the message that he’s not familiar with what Anti-Semitic means.

He declined to disavow the theory that Israel and Jews orchestrated the attacks that killed more than 3,000 innocent American office workers.

‘Well, I heard that. I saw it in different…I heard it, I believe on TV and I read it somewhere on the Internet and heard people talking like that,’ Rakeeb said. ‘Usually, I just treat it as news, whether it is true or not, I have no way of knowning.’

The FBI warns that militant Muslim prison chaplains sympathetic to terrorists are trying to recruit inmates as future operatives.

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